He stood outside his home in a gated, desert community, calm but armed and ready.

Once a member of the Wilton Fire Commission, Hesham El Abd, 58, moved to Egypt in 2005 and has watched the climate of the country shift dramatically since anti-government protests began to surge last week.

They are revolting against economic peril, sub-par education, decades of police-state repression and nonexistent socioeconomic mobility, he said.

What began as a grassroots call-to-arms on Jan. 25 to demand the ouster of long-time President Hosni Mubarak has exploded into prolonged protest.

The government warned them, El Abd said. They closed the banks. They announced curfews and Friday, in an act that mobilized human rights activists throughout the world, they blacked out Internet and mobile communications.

"It backfired," El Abd said. "The movement has taken on a life of its own, and it's not stoppable."

The former Wiltonian patrolled his neighborhood Wednesday night -- 37 miles outside the capital, along the Cairo-Alexandria-Matrouh Free Highway -- carrying an automatic rifle. Since the protesters clashed with "state security hooligans and thugs," who looted homes and staged violent attacks, apartment buildings and city blocks and gated communities alike have taken up arms to defend themselves, he said.

Earlier this week, El Abd awoke to find thousands of prisoners wandering outside his home, released from a facility about 38 miles west. Some were political prisoners, he said, but others were rapists, drug dealers and murderers.

"They were all set free," he said.

Still, the greatest danger remains downtown, he said. That's where his 85-year-old mother lives and, like tons of residents in the densely populated capital, she cannot leave her building.

"Outside that area, life is going on, but people are limited in their movement," he said.

Where El Abd lives, police impose curfew from 3 p.m. to 8 a.m.

"If I decide to take my car and leave my gated community, if I pass the police, they will shoot me," he said.

Life began to normalized Wednesday when Internet service returned -- "Whatever normal is in this part of the world," El Abd said -- but later that afternoon, supporters and opponents of President Hosni Mubarak were clashing violently in Tahrir Square in the dangerous new phase of the country's political upheaval.

The supporters lobbed a stream of Molotov cocktails; Cairo was burning.

"We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow," El Abd said.

It has been life in flux. People aren't going to work. Shops aren't open for business. Neighbors have been sharing food and money, thinking this is temporary, El Abd said.

"Things are going to change," he said, though he could not guess when. "Unfortunately, democracy doesn't happen overnight."

Egyptian by birth, El Abd spent 40-odd years in the United States, half of those in Wilton.

He ultimately moved to Cairo with his wife -- a New Jersey native -- when he saw the Middle Eastern economy gaining momentum. For a living, El Abd helps corporations restructure the way they train employees to become managers. After all, he said, most Arabs are 25 and younger and will need those skills to compete in the global workforce. They are clamoring for jobs, he said, and hope and justice.

They were the first Egyptians in the streets, he said.

"What's happening in Egypt will spread, like it or not, to other countries that have similar situations," El Abd said.

"It could be Saudi Arabi, it could be Kuwait. Yemen, certainly, or Sudan. Maybe even Libya. The young people, who have access to the Internet, are seeing that they don't have to live that way anymore."